


A Blossom Out of Season

by WretchedArtifact



Series: Blossom/Bloom [1]
Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Fluff, Honeymoon, M/M, Magical Pregnancy, Mpreg
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-29
Updated: 2019-07-29
Packaged: 2020-07-23 17:48:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20012341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WretchedArtifact/pseuds/WretchedArtifact
Summary: When Victor and Yuuri go to the tropics for their honeymoon, they stumble upon a strange, star-shaped flower, whose glittering pollen muddies their senses and leaves Victor with an utterly impossible souvenir.





	A Blossom Out of Season

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Soulstoned](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Soulstoned/gifts).



When Victor unlocked the front door of the bungalow, he pushed the door open and then put his hand on Yuuri's shoulder to stop him from going inside. "One of us has to carry the other over the threshold!" Victor said. "That's the tradition, isn't it?"

“Is it?”

"Well, it is in movies, anyway," Victor said.

"Hmm,” Yuuri said. “I think tradition means more to you than me, so—"

Yuuri set down his suitcase, came in close to Victor, and _whoosh_ —swept him up off his feet and into the air. Victor slung his arms around Yuuri's neck with a giddy laugh and held on as Yuuri carried him inside. He was being a terrible coach, letting Yuuri risk straining his back like that, but Victor could never get enough of Yuuri's unexpected displays of upper-body strength. Victor had almost always been the taller one in his relationships, and consequently he hadn't been carried around by anyone since he was a child, until one day when he and Yuuri were fooling around on the ice, practicing their pair skate. Yuuri had gotten an impish look in his eyes, and he skated in close and _whoosh_ —he swept Victor up off his skates and into the air, like it was nothing. Victor had gone lightheaded in delight, and when Yuuri returned him to the ice, they had to stop practicing for a few minutes so Victor could express his delight with several long, enthusiastic kisses.

Yuuri carried Victor through the small front room of the bungalow and into the bedroom, where he deposited Victor on the bed and said, with a little purr in his voice, "Stay there."

Victor kicked off his shoes and took off his coat as he listened to Yuuri bringing in their suitcases from outside. Once the front door was closed, Yuuri came back into the bedroom and started kicking off his own shoes, his expression tired but eager. When he climbed onto the bed, Victor wrapped his arms around Yuuri and pulled him down and kissed him so thoroughly that, when they broke apart for air, Yuuri looked just as dizzy as Victor felt. “I’ve been looking forward to this so much,” Victor said, stroking Yuuri’s travel-mussed hair. “No more competitions, no more wedding preparations, just me and my gorgeous husband doing absolutely nothing for two weeks.”

Yuuri snuggled into the crook of Victor’s arm, his head pillowed on Victor’s shoulder. “Not _absolutely_ nothing,” Yuuri said. “We’re going to eat everything we couldn’t eat during the competition season. And I mean _everything_.”

“And we’ll take lots of naps,” Victor agreed.

“And we’ll—” Yuuri yawned. “—make up for all those nights when we were too tired from practice to have any fun.”

“Speaking of which,” Victor said, a little light suggestiveness in his voice. He leaned in and kissed Yuuri’s forehead. “This is our first official night as a married couple.”

“Well—”

“Our first official night while not on an airplane,” Victor amended. “And you know the tradition about wedding nights, right?”

“Mmm,” Yuuri said. He lifted his head off Victor’s shoulder and kissed him. “And I know how important traditions are to you.”

The two of them kept kissing, slow and sweet, for several minutes. The bed was soft and comfortable, and Victor felt his muscles finally start to relax after the stiffness of the long plane ride. His head, lifted off the pillow so he could kiss Yuuri, felt unusually heavy on his neck.

Yuuri’s lips pulled away from his. “Okay, I have to be honest,” Yuuri said, sounding guilty. “I don’t know if I can stay awake long enough to do anything fun.”

“I’m about a minute away from passing out, too,” Victor admitted. “I guess traditions are for young people.”

Yuuri gave a soft snort and put his head back down on Victor’s shoulder. “You still count as a _young person_ , Vitya.”

“No, don’t flatter me,” Victor said sadly, hugging Yuuri close to his chest. “I’m a retiree. Young people aren’t retirees.”

“They are when they’ve abused their knee joints as badly as you did.”

Victor was too tired to keep up the playful argument. Old or young, Victor was _exhausted._ “I love you,” he murmured, dropping one last kiss into Yuuri’s hair. Then, with a little thrill, he added: “Mr. Nikiforov.”

Yuuri’s laugh against Victor’s shoulder was faint but delighted. “I love you too,” he said. “Mr. Katsuki.”

* * *

For the first few days of their honeymoon, Victor and Yuuri ignored the gorgeous tropical scenery surrounding their bungalow in favor of lazing around indoors. They let themselves be slothful in a way they could never afford to be during the competition season. They cooked and ate delicious meals; they laid in bed reading books or playing on their phones; and they made love with whatever level of energy they had when the mood struck. Sometimes the sex was fast, and hard, and _amazing_ —and sometimes it was slow, languid, pleasure building upon pleasure until they emerged from a haze to find the afternoon had long since turned to night.

But eventually they had their fill of laziness—they were athletes, after all—and they started to go explore the area surrounding their secluded bungalow. It was gorgeous: the crystal blue ocean waters were fed by a river, and one afternoon they hiked along the river’s edge until they found a small pool fed by a waterfall. They swam and splashed for hours and walked home sun-baked and happy, taking pleasure in the fresh air and the burn of their muscles. “It’s so beautiful here,” Victor said contentedly, his fingers interlaced with Yuuri’s as they walked.

“I wonder what kind of flowers these are,” Yuuri said, nodding toward the foliage alongside the path. The riverbank was dotted with small orange flowers, six-petaled and star-like, with white centers.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen this type before,” Victor said. While most of the flowers were clustered closer to the river, there was a larger one growing right near the path, and Victor leaned down and plucked it up. “Oh!” he said, as he held it out towards Yuuri. “The center’s kind of...glittery, isn’t it?”

The soft pollen in the center seemed to wink and catch the light as Victor carried it along. He brought it to his nose and sniffed: it had a surprisingly heavy sweetness to its scent. Yuuri leaned in and sniffed it, too. “Huh,” Yuuri said. “It’s nice, but...not what I was expecting.”

When they got back to the bungalow, Victor filled a glass with water and set the flower in it, to help it last a little longer. He and Yuuri showered together, keeping the water lukewarm—they were both feeling a little overheated from the hike back. When they dried off and settled down into their soft bed, Victor expected sleep to sweep him away quickly, after all the hiking and swimming they’d done.

But even while he felt sleepy, he also felt strangely _aware:_ aware of Yuuri lying next to him, sun-kissed and beautiful, his strong body tipped lazily back onto the pillows at the top of the bed. And when Yuuri glanced over at Victor, Victor could see a similar _awareness_ in his eyes, like Victor was a cool glass of water and Yuuri had just realized how thirsty he was.

They made love twice before they fell asleep: kissing hungrily, their hands famished for each other, Yuuri’s gorgeous weight heavy on top of Victor as each perfect thrust of Yuuri’s hips set off showers of sparks behind Victor’s closed eyes.

* * *

Victor woke up a few hours later, sticky and sore and a little sad, for some reason. Yuuri was deeply asleep, limbs all tangled up in the top sheet, and Victor got up and took some aspirin and sat down at the small kitchen table so he wouldn’t wake Yuuri up.

The star-shaped flower was looking limp and dull in the water glass where Victor had left it. Victor reached out and brushed his thumb over the soft white pollen in its center. It came away easily on his skin, winking and glittering in the low light. And for some reason that made Victor feel sadder, even though he wasn’t sure why he was sad—even though, up until a few minutes ago, he’d been experiencing one of the happiest weeks of his life. There was an ache—a _longing_ —sitting in his chest, out of nowhere, apropos of nothing.

Victor brushed the pollen off his skin and went back to bed. He felt a sudden urge to be close to Yuuri, and even though he felt bad for disturbing Yuuri’s sleep, he couldn’t help but pull him in close, gathering Yuuri to his chest while Yuuri mumbled sleepily and re-settled himself in Victor’s arms. Victor felt a little better once Yuuri’s cheek was resting on his shoulder, his dark hair close enough for Victor to kiss.

When Victor fell back asleep, he started dreaming: a vivid, sweet, domestic little dream, all taking place in a house he didn’t recognize but instinctively knew was his own. The couch from Victor’s apartment in St. Petersburg had been transported into the middle of it, and Victor was lying down on it with his head on a pillow propped up against the armrest. Yuuri was in his arms—Victor had a vague sense of double-awareness, knowing the _real_ Yuuri was in his arms back in the bungalow—and Makkachin was curled up on the floor below them, sleeping peacefully.

Then the scene blinked and shifted. Victor was sitting up—Yuuri was tucked against his side, reading something on his phone—and Makkachin was on the couch next to Yuuri, curled up around a little bundle of slightly darker fluff. A puppy. Yuuri scratched behind the little puppy’s sleepily twitching ears, and Victor felt a little sentimental thrill at the sight of it. He and Yuuri had been talking about getting another dog, to keep Makkachin active and in high spirits now that she was getting older.

Then Victor looked down, and he realized he was holding something in his arms. A blanket-wrapped bundle, somehow light and substantial at the same time.

Victor folded the blanket back. He was holding a baby: a tiny infant, her face wrinkled in sleep. She had a headful of wispy hair, silvery-blonde in the lamplight, and the shape of her features—her eyes, her nose, her chin—precisely matched a picture Hiroko had once shown him of Yuuri as a baby, chubby-cheeked and sleeping in Toshiya’s arms.

And for a moment Victor felt utterly content. It was a perfect vision of the future: a house of their own in Hasetsu, two happy dogs, and a baby—his and Yuuri’s, her small form a faultless blend of both of their features.

Then the sadness started to creep in again. Because almost all of it was possible—the house in Hasetsu, the puppy—but one part of the picture could never be a reality.

There could never be a baby who was truly both Victor’s and Yuuri’s.

* * *

Victor woke up the next morning feeling quiet and wistful, and when he went into the kitchen he saw Yuuri at the stove and the sad little orange flower in the water glass, its petals limp and shriveled, a thin fur of pollen smeared over the tabletop. Victor picked up the glass and disposed of the dead flower, scraping the pollen off the table with a paper towel.

“Good morning!” Yuuri said cheerfully. Victor didn’t know what he was making, but there were _two_ sticks of butter softening on the counter next to him, so it was bound to be good.

“Good morning,” Victor said. He came up behind Yuuri and wrapped his arms around Yuuri’s waist. Yuuri leaned back into him for a moment, sweet and trusting, and Victor gave him a kiss on the cheek. “How did you sleep?”

“Very well,” Yuuri said. “How about you?”

“Mmm,” Victor said. “All right. I had a strange dream.”

“A bad dream?”

“No, just strange,” Victor said.

Yuuri tilted his head a little and paused, like he was waiting for Victor to go on, but Victor didn’t want to get into the details. He and Yuuri had talked about the possibility of having children before, and Yuuri’s opinion had been a cheerful “ _maybe someday, after we_ _’re both retired.”_ Yuuri was four years younger than him, and in his physical prime, and Victor doubted he was losing sleep over the fact that any children they might have wouldn’t share both Victor’s hair and Yuuri’s smile.

“Do you want go on another trip to the waterfall today?” Yuuri asked.

Victor nuzzled the side of Yuuri’s face. “Let’s see how we feel after eating all that butter,” he said.

* * *

When their two weeks in the bungalow were up, Victor and Yuuri returned to St. Petersburg, both of them tanner and noticeably heavier than they were when they left. “You guys look _gross_ ,” Yuri said when he saw them for the first time.

“It’s called _relaxation_ ,” Victor said. “You should give it a try! It is the off-season, after all.”

“I don’t get to relax, do I?” Yuri said sullenly. “I have to learn all this choreography before you and the piggy run off to Japan and never come back.”

Victor had promised to choreograph Yuri’s free skate for the upcoming season, as a way to soften the blow of them leaving Russia for the indefinite future. It just made more sense to train in Hasetsu: there were more options for ice time, and Yuuri benefited from being close to his friends and family, and now that Victor was retired, it seemed odd for him to hang around the Sports Champions Club as a coach rather than a competitor. Victor arranged to meet up with Yuri a few days after they got home, and arrived at the rink feeling a little ungainly with the extra weight he’d put on.

About halfway through the practice session, Victor came out of a jump feeling queasy, and he skated off the ice to Yuri’s aggrieved shouts and ended up being sick in a nearby trashcan. “Oh, shit,” Yuri said, coming over to observe Victor’s misery. “Did you get some weird bug while you were on vacation?”

“Maybe,” Victor said. “I don’t know what it could be, I felt fine up until now.”

Just the possibility of Victor being sick made Yuri move back and put a good chunk of distance between the two of them. “Don’t infect _me_ ,” Yuri said. “Go to a fucking doctor.”

So Victor did. “Post-honeymoon nausea?” his doctor joked. “Well, if the circumstances were different, my first thought would probably be to congratulate you on getting your family started so quickly. But in this case—”

Victor felt a different sort of queasiness when he said that. Before he and Yuuri got married, Victor had never dwelled on the fact that they couldn’t have biological children together, but now the thought was permanently lodged in the back of his head, bothering him, making him feel sad. “But that’s not something I have to worry about, is it?” Victor said, with a forced little laugh.

“No,” his doctor said. “I’ll go ahead and run some blood tests, to see if we can figure out what it actually is.”

Victor stayed home from the rink over the next few days. But even though he was staying off the ice and not exerting himself too much, he still felt periodically nauseated. “Poor Vitya,” Yuuri said, bringing a glass of water over to where Victor was lying motionlessly on the couch. He set the glass down on the coffee table and laid a gentle kiss on Victor’s forehead.

“Don’t get too close,” Victor croaked. “I might be contagious.”

“I feel like I would’ve caught it already, if it were contagious,” Yuuri said. “You and I did all the same things during the trip.”

When Victor finally heard back from his doctor, he didn’t have any real news: the blood tests hadn’t revealed anything, and he asked Victor to come back in for a follow-up appointment the next day. Victor, sick and increasingly frustrated, laid on the couch with a frown on his face and did a search on his phone for the resort where they had honeymooned. Maybe other people had gotten sick there and would be talking about it online.

Most of the official reviews of the resort were positive. There were a few tepid reviews with generic complaints, and then one explicitly negative review.

 ** _IRRESPONSIBLE NEGLIGENCE!!_** read the title. _Fell violently ill post-trip_, _as surrounding landscape is poisonous! Management blamed us for bringing flowers from outside into rental house, even though no posted warnings not to!_

Victor felt a slight prickle on the back of his neck. He remembered the little star-shaped flower he had plucked from the side of the trail and brought inside. He had gotten its pollen on his skin. This person was saying it was poisonous?

With nervous fingers, Victor typed out a private message to the reviewer. _Could you tell me anything more about the illness you experienced at this resort?_ he asked. _I stayed there recently and have also fallen ill after being exposed to the local flowers._

He knew it was a bit of a long shot, and he didn’t expect an answer right away—who knew which time zone the reviewer lived in? So he was startled—unpleasantly startled—when, within the next half-hour, he received a brief, emphatic reply.

_My phone number attached below. Please call at earliest convenience. Impossible to explain in writing. _

* * *

The next day, at Victor’s follow-up appointment, his doctor observed Victor’s face with a frown. “You aren’t feeling any better?” he asked.

Victor knew there were dark bags under his eyes, and that his skin was wan and pale. Yuuri had commented on it too, before Victor left the apartment that morning. “No, my symptoms are the same,” Victor said. He swallowed, and when he started speaking again, his voice came out shaking. “Dima,” he said. “We’ve known each other for a long time, right?”

Dmitri had been his doctor ever since Victor started training under Yakov, almost two decades ago. He’d seen Victor through countless illnesses and injuries over the course of Victor’s skating career. “Yes,” Dmitri said, sounding cautious.

“Would you—” Victor’s voice failed him for a moment. “Would you be willing to...humor me, and do an ultrasound of this area, looking for...abnormalities?”

And he put his hand on his stomach.

* * *

It took Victor three days of fitful sleep and rehearsing his words before he could tell Yuuri.

Yuuri listened to Victor’s halting, practiced sentences and looked at the printed images on the coffee table in front of him. He touched his finger to the circled part of a grainy ultrasound. “A...womb?” Yuuri said, his voice uncertain.

“Yes.”

“And it’s...new?”

“I think so,” Victor said. “I’ve never had that area looked at before, so Dima says it might’ve always been there, but...I don’t think that’s the case.”

Yuuri’s hesitant hand drifted over to the next picture. “And you think this is real?” he said. “Not Photoshopped, or...misleading, somehow?”

It was one of several pictures that Victor had received from Rodrigo, the man who wrote the negative review of the resort online. Victor had laid them out in chronological order. Rodrigo with his husband, looking trim and tanned on the beach at the resort; Rodrigo taking a selfie in the bathroom mirror, his stomach faintly rounded; Rodrigo in a hospital gown, his belly an enormous lump under the thin cloth; and then Rodrigo and his husband together in front of their house, smiling, a dark-haired, bundled-up baby in their arms.

“He gave me the number of his doctor,” Victor said. “I spoke to both of them on the phone. Maybe it’s some kind of...weird scam, or something, but...”

He watched Yuuri’s face with dread as Yuuri tried to process it all. What Victor was suggesting was so wildly unbelievable, so _insane_ , that Yuuri would be well within his rights to flatly disbelieve it. _Victor_ had flatly disbelieved it, when he spoke to Rodrigo and heard his story. _“It’s something about the flowers_ ,” Rodrigo had told him. _“I went back to the resort and showed them what had happened to me, and I could tell they weren’t surprised. They wouldn’t admit to_ _anything_ _, but they weren_ _’t surprised.”_

But it was harder to disbelieve the image on the ultrasound. A _womb,_ inside Victor’s belly, where there shouldn’t be one.

“There was something strange about that flower,” Yuuri said after a long silence. “I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I felt...different...after I smelled it. I felt like if I wasn’t touching you, I’d shrivel up and starve. You felt it too, didn’t you? We were both so tired, but I _had_ to be touching you.”

Victor’s heavy heart momentarily lightened on a swell of hope. “Yes,” he said. “I felt that, too.”

Yuuri’s tongue darted out between his lips, wetting them with unconscious nervousness. “When would we know for sure that you’re really...?”

He didn’t finish the sentence. “Well,” Victor said carefully. “In a normal pregnancy, it would take a few more weeks before the baby showed up on an ultrasound.”

“Okay,” Yuuri said. “So we’ll just...”

Then Yuuri’s expression shifted. The nervousness and confusion on his face melted away into something firmer, and he scooted over on the couch and pulled Victor into his arms. “Vitya,” Yuuri said, and the hushed concern in his voice put a lump in Victor’s throat. “Are you okay?”

And Victor knew he didn’t mean “ _Are you insane?_ _”_ The concern in Yuuri’s voice was the same kind he used when Victor injured himself on the ice, or had a difficult phone call with his parents. It was worried, and sympathetic, and full of love.

“I don’t know,” Victor said, and the tears he’d been holding back spilled over. He buried himself in Yuuri’s arms, hiding his face against Yuuri’s shoulder. “I feel crazy, and guilty, and—”

“Why guilty?” Yuuri asked.

“Because I wanted it to happen,” Victor said. “Because I _wished_ for it to happen. And I know you said you didn’t want kids until later, and it didn’t bother you that they wouldn’t be biologically ours, and—”

“Whoa,” Yuuri said. “Vitya, slow down. I didn’t say that, did I?”

“You said you didn’t want kids until later.”

“I was just trying to be responsible,” Yuuri said. He kissed the side of Victor’s head. “We both saw how hard it was for you to coach _and_ compete. I just thought that adding parenthood on top of that would be...more stressful than it needed to be.”

Victor squeezed him tighter. “And of _course_ I’ve always been a little sad that we wouldn’t be able to have kids together,” Yuuri said. “Can you even imagine how good they’d be at skating? It would be too unfair for the universe to even allow it.”

Victor laughed softly into Yuuri’s shoulder. “Vitya,” Yuuri said, and he pulled back a little, tipping Victor’s tear-stained face up with a nudge of his fingers under Victor’s chin. “If this is real, then it’s a miracle. And I’m not going to be upset about a _miracle_.”

Victor closed his eyes against a fresh rush of tears and nodded. Yuuri pulled him back in, held him tight against his chest. “But we’re not going to know for sure for weeks,” Victor said.

“That’s okay,” Yuuri said. “We’ve got a lot to do in the next few weeks to keep us busy. We’ll just wait and see.”

Victor nodded into the tear-damp fabric of Yuuri’s shirt. “I love you,” he said.

“I love you so much,” Yuuri said, and kept his arms tight around Victor for a very long time.

* * *

So the two of them entered a strange new sense of unreality as they moved forward with their lives. They decided to postpone their move to Hasetsu, so Victor could stay close to his doctor, and Victor insisted that Yuuri start his training as if it were any other season. If Victor really _was_ pregnant, his date of conception would put him due somewhere in late January, right in the middle of the competition season. It was an extremely awkward time of year to be keeping secrets from the press. He would be visibly showing during the Grand Prix events, close to bursting at Japanese Nationals, and possessed of a two-week old newborn at Four Continents. “Maybe I should just take the season off,” Yuuri said.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Victor said staunchly. “You’re at the peak of your career, I’m not going to let anything slow you down now. We’ll just get through the season like we normally do. Maybe we can have Yakov or Minako step in for me at competitions, so I don’t end up making a spectacle of myself.”

Yuuri looked troubled. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to focus on my programs, if I’m at a competition and you’re at home by yourself.”

“I didn’t say I wouldn’t come to the competitions,” Victor said. “I just said I wouldn’t make a spectacle of myself. I can always put on a trenchcoat and watch you from backstage.”

So the two of them tried to establish as normal a routine as possible. The one major change in their lives was that Victor made the choice to stop skating at all, just in case it was a risk to the baby. He missed skating immediately, and he found it aggravating to have to create choreography on paper and demonstrate it in his shoes, rather than just performing it himself on the ice. But he was conscious of the tremendous gift he had been given, and he was afraid of doing anything that would jeopardize it. Even if he still sometimes woke up on those mornings when nausea didn’t trouble him and thought, _am I crazy? Am I making this all up?_

But as the weeks passed, and Victor’s nausea got better and worse in waves, Victor’s doubt quietly stared to fade away. He was eating well, but his normally flat, toned stomach had the tiniest hint of roundness to it. He watched that roundness like a hawk, staring down at it every day in the shower, until one day he realized that it was protruding just enough to obscure the normal straight-down view of his cock between his legs. He could still see it if he leaned forward, like, an inch, but if he was standing up straight he couldn’t see it at all.

When he emerged from the shower he found Yuuri in front of the sink, sleepily brushing his teeth. “Yuuri, look!” Victor said with excitement. He struck a pose—jutting his stomach out just a bit to give the little bump more prominence—and Yuuri looked down and fixed his eyes on the little swell.

He burst into tears.

“Oh!” Victor said, alarmed. “Yuuri, are you—”

And even though Victor was still naked and dripping from his shower, Yuuri walked over and burrowed himself in Victor’s arms. “Can I feel it?” Yuuri asked tearfully, his wet face pressed against Victor’s equally wet shoulder.

“Of course,” Victor said. He guided Yuuri’s hand to the low bump. Yuuri’s touch was soft and hesitant and exploratory, and when he finally looked up at Victor, his tear-streaked face was full of fervent emotion. “Sweetheart, why are you crying?” Victor asked.

“It’s _real_ ,” Yuuri said. “I mean—I believed you before, that it was real, but—” He pushed his face back against Victor’s shoulder, his hand still soft on Victor’s belly. “Vitya, that’s our _baby_.”

Yuuri had been nothing but sweet and supportive of Victor over the last few weeks, but the visible, tangible evidence of their growing child was clearly making things concrete for him in a way they hadn’t been before. It was one thing for Yuuri to read about the stages of pregnancy online, but it was another thing entirely for him to fit the curve of his palm over the bump and know, without a doubt, that underneath his hand was the life they had created: a perfect, impossible blend of the two of them together.

“I don't know what to do," Yuuri said. "I feel like—like I want to wrap you up in twenty blankets, so nothing can hurt you.”

“Maybe you could start by wrapping me up in a towel?” Victor asked lightly.

So Yuuri found him a towel, and brought a second one along so he could carefully pat Victor’s silver hair dry. It was growing more quickly than it usually did, almost to the point where Victor could pull it back into the world’s tiniest ponytail. “What can I do?” Yuuri asked him, with a hint of that fervency in his voice again. “What can I do to help you?”

And in truth, Victor still felt normal enough that there was nothing in particular he needed that Yuuri wasn’t already giving him. But the new concrete reality of the baby’s existence had clearly hit Yuuri hard, and now he needed somewhere to focus all of his emotions.

“I know it's going to be strange, and difficult," Victor said. "I'm not one hundred percent sure Dima's going to believe this is real, even when he sees the proof on the ultrasound. But...it's okay." Victor smiled up at Yuuri. "Just stay close to me. That's all I need."

Yuuri set the towel aside and threaded his fingers through Victor’s damp hair. He kissed Victor with such tender devotion that it filled Victor up with sparkling light.

“I will," Yuuri said. His hand slipped down to rest on Victor's belly. "I'll stay close to both of you. Always. I promise."

* * *


End file.
